User talk:Ujjwol

Welcome

Hi Ujjwol, nice to see you here on Wikipedia. About your edits on Pāṇini: unfortunately on Wikipedia, if you don't cite a source for some information, it's liable to be tagged "^{[citation needed]}" by someone and eventually even deleted (see WP:Verifiability). So when you add information like "His mother's name was Dākṣī" or "Scholar agree that his death was on Trayodaśī Tithī (त्रयोदशी तिथी). So, native grammarians don't read Sanskrit Grammar on that day", it's a good idea to mention the source (using <ref> tags) — whatever book (or website, but preferably book) you got that information from, for instance. See here for a quick how-to on citing sources (or you can just insert them any way you want, and someone will clean it up later). Best regards, Shreevatsa (talk) 06:11, 7 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks Shreevatsa for your welcoming message. On citing the source of information, I have some difficult. I am studying at Sanskrit Grammar from a Sanskrit Guru, he told me all the stuffs I wrote. As our tradition we also don't use any book while learning, the only paper I use is for making note in exercise. So, it is difficult for me to find out book which mentions that and asking Guru stuffs like that is not so humble.

Wikipedia is said to be free encyclopædia, what is so open source about if we have to cite everything from some copyrighted book ? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Ujjwol (talk • contribs) 14:30, 7 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, I've moved your comment here so that the conversation can be in one place... you can just reply here.

Actually, "free" or "open source" here means that the encyclopædia is available to everyone, and anyone can copy the text from Wikipedia and put it up on their own website or build on it, as long as they credit Wikipedia (per the Creative Commons license). It still has some guidelines on what can be included. After all, even open-source software programs don't allow anyone to contribute any code they like, only code that is correct. :-) In this case, the verifiability criterion was added in the early days of Wikipedia after some users kept adding false information… clearly there needed to be a way of ensuring that only reliable information is put on Wikipedia, and this was chosen. (You are right that we cannot just copy sentences from some copyrighted book—that's copyright violation—but the information must be attributable to some source.)

Anyway, I understand the difficulty in the current context… a lot of facts are merely floating around in the minds of gurus, and it's not easy to ask him. In such cases, you can try searching (say) http://books.google.com to see if any published books contain the information you added, and cite one of the books. In the worst case, if nothing else works, you can put up the information on your blog or somewhere with "my guru said this", and hopefully someone will quote that blog as a source :-) (This is actually unlikely, because blogs are usually not considered reliable sources, but just gave an example of something being verifiable.) Doing all this is a bit of trouble, but it's necessary… Regards, Shreevatsa (talk) 17:28, 7 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Ok, I have checked out Google Books, there are some good books to cite. Thanks for the help. Ujjwol(उज्ज्वल) 16:17, 8 February 2011 (UTC)

Comment by User:TheMandarin

My 2 cents : As you say here, finding reliable sources is not as tough as it seems. To give a quick suggestion, goto http://books.google.com and you can invariably find what you are looking for--provided what you write is accurate. Citing sources are necessary to avoid original research. When you have enough time, go through WP:IRS. Hope this helps. --TheMandarin (talk) 15:15, 7 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]